How do small changes make you an effective Scrum Master?

Scrum Guide from the creators of Scrum (Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber) has defined the role of Scrum Master as the one who promotes and supports Scrum. Scrum Master does this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

In the real world, the role of Scrum Master is the most abused one (talking from my own experience). A lot of organizations mould it the way they want. I have seen titles like Project Manager cum Scrum Master, 60% Project Manager and 40% Scrum Master and many more. Do you agree with me? If not, search for job descriptions of Scrum Master in any job portal.

In this article, I share some instances from my journey as a Scrum Master and how I thrived on being effective at my role and still learning.

A good Scrum Master solves impediments for a team, and a great Scrum Master coaches a team to solve their obstacles.

When I started my journey as a scrum master, I learned that one of the roles of a scrum master is Impediment Buster. Initially, I used to get requests from the team like — Saurabh, but my outlook is not working. Can you help me? Saurabh, the XYZ person from another group, is not replying to my email. Can you please escalate this? Saurabh, I need a coffee. Can you please get one for me (Yes, I got this request multiple times) and so on?

Initially, I used to solve every problem and worked as a puppet master to the team. With experience, I realized only some things they come up with are an impediment. Being a Scrum Master, it is essential to identify the real impediments and then solve them.

If the team itself can resolve something on the impediment list, then as a Scrum Master, we should guide them to solve it themselves. This will make the team self-sufficient and high performing, and your role as a Scrum Master will be easy, and you can focus on real impediments. Real impediments are the ones that the team cannot solve by themselves, like the ones which need organization leaders' intervention.

Be a Facilitator, not a Scribe.

Initially, as a Scrum Master, I was expected to take notes of all the meetings, send the meeting invite, create the stories in Jira, adding retro-action points and a long list which made me a good writer, but that is not what I was supposed to do.

When the team started self-organizing itself, I set up the stage in the meetings and set precise boundaries for collaboration. People self-organized to write down their notes, user stories and other tasks.

Be a Servant Leader than a Team Boss

In many organizations, Scrum Master is considered a team boss or a manager who assigns work to the team and hires and fires members. He is also a decision-maker in appraisals of the people.

I was fortunate enough to work with organizations where I worked as a servant leader, and my role was to focus on the team's needs to achieve results.

Be a change agent for the organization.

Change can happen even if one person starts it. As a Scrum Master, one should provide an environment or create a culture where a Scrum Team can thrive and excel.

A culture where team success is valued above individual success, where the team holds themselves and others accountable, where there are trust and ownership, a culture that invites and inspires to get the most out of themselves, promotes continuous improvement and experimentation, people appreciate everyone for their unique talent and skills.

If you, as a Scrum Master, can cultivate such a culture, the results will be a high-performing team focusing on delivering value to the customer.

Be a Facilitator, not the chairman of the events.

How often have you seen Scrum events being the status meeting where team members answer or report to Scrum Master?

Also, the Scrum Master is responsible for sending the status report to managers. He is not the chairman of the events. Don'tThis will create trust issues between the team and the Scrum Master. Don’t do this. People will start sugarcoating accurate information.

There are some excellent facilitating techniques that a Scrum Master can learn, like the liberating structures. He is a facilitator who ensures that all the events are time-boxed and serve the purpose they are meant for. Every event allows inspecting and adapting as Daily Scrum gives us a chance to check the daily progress towards the Sprint Goal, Sprint Review offers an opportunity to study and adjust the done increment, and Sprint Retrospective is an event where the team inspects and adjusts their practices and processes.

Scrum Master is not an Admin or a Secretary of a Team.

Scrum Master is not an admin of your Jira, VSTS, or Jenkins. He needs to be there to update the status of the task.

He is not a team secretary whose job is not to send meeting invites or plan the Scrum events. I have seen people asking for leave approval from the Scrum Master. He keeps track of the leaves of the team members.

Scrum Master is not a superhero.

Scrum Master is not a superhero who will have answers to all the questions or solve your impediments before it was even an impediment. Allow them to learn, make mistakes, and learn from them.

There are some more roles and responsibilities of a Scrum Master, like he is a coach, a mentor, and a teacher to the team. A great Scrum Master focuses on learning different tools and techniques to enhance his skills and use them to help the section become a high-performing team.

I hope you have enjoyed learning something from this journey of mine. I will learn from it and adapt it in my article. Please share your feedback.

Sources — My journey as a Scrum Master and white paper from Barry Overeem (https://www.scrum.org/resources/8-stances-scrum-master)